I’m assured that will render it deniable. If you take my meaning.”
“Deniable?”
“I’m incurring a heavy financial loss and I feel, in all fairness, that should be the full extent of my involvement.”
“You… what?”
“In the circumstances, there’s nothing more I can say.” And with that, quietly and conclusively, he put down the telephone.
Desperate situations call for desperate remedies. Standing in the call box with my father’s parting words echoing in my mind, I knew I had to act decisively. Skulking around Birmingham, waiting to see whether my luck ran out before my money, wasn’t going to achieve anything. I had only one slim hope of nailing Emma Moresco and it was time to take it.
I picked up the telephone and started dialling.
“Hi there,” Miv answered.
“It’s me. Chris.”
“Chris?”
“Sounds like you’ve seen a newspaper.”
“Yes. And I couldn’t believe what I read in it.”
“Then don’t. I didn’t do it, Miv, believe me.”
“Then why have you gone on the run?”
“Because I’m the only person who knows who really did it, and I have to stay free until I find them.”
“Can’t you just tell the police?”
“They wouldn’t believe me. But I’m hoping you would if you heard it. I need your help, Miv. You’re the only one I can turn to.”
“What about your family?”
“The police will be watching them. But they may not have found out about you yet. Have you heard from them?”
“No.”
“There you are, then. Besides, why would I turn to my ex-wife in my hour of need after the things she said about me in the divorce court?”
“Exactly. Why would you?”
“Remember the day you caught sight of me drunk in Shaftesbury Avenue as you rode past in a taxi?”
“I remember.”
That’s the reason. I’m not drunk, but I am in dire straits. I need you to stop the taxi and get out, Miv. Will you do that? Will you give me a chance? It’s all I’m asking.”
“You look terrible,” said Miv by way of greeting three hours later. The reflection I could see over her shoulder in the night-blackened window of the buffet at Crewe railway station suggested she was understating the case, but I comforted myself that the worse I looked the less I resembled my photograph in the newspapers. Miv, by radiant contrast, demonstrated the beneficial effects of the outdoor life and a vegan diet, her clear-skinned beauty defying all attempts at camouflage. She was clad in a weird mix of hippy and army surplus, but somehow managed to wear it like a cocktail dress.
“Thanks for coming,” I mumbled, sipping at my coffee. “I wondered if you’d have second thoughts after I’d rung off.”
“I did.”
“But you still came.”
“You gave me plenty of experience of being stood up when we were married, Chris. I wouldn’t want to make anybody feel that way.”
I winced. “If that’s how you feel
“It is, but I’m here, so you may as well say your piece. Things must be even worse than the newspapers made them sound for you to ask me for help.”
They’re as bad as they can be,” I said, leaning across the table towards her and lowering my voice. “I’ve been fitted up by a professional.”
“And would this professional be the woman who posed as my solicitor?”
“No. But you could say they’re related.”
“So, I’m partly to blame for the trouble you’re in. Is that it?”
“Not really. But if believing you are will make you help me …”
She sighed. “What do you want me to do?”
“I want you to phone Essex CID when you get home and tell them I’ve been in touch. Say I’m short of money because I’m afraid to make any traceable withdrawals from my bank account and have asked you to tide me over. Say you’ve agreed to meet me tomorrow afternoon at Holyhead ferry terminal to hand over some cash.”
“Holyhead?”
“Invent whatever details you like. Say I’m thinking of slipping over to Ireland or something. It doesn’t matter. Just so long as you focus their attention a long way from where I’m going to be.”
“And where’s that?”
“Clacton.”
She raised her eyebrows. “The scene of the crime.”
“Perhaps that’ll convince you I’m innocent.”
“Oh, I’m convinced. But are you! Convinced I won’t tell them the truth, I mean.”
I looked her straight in the eye. “Yes. I am.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Because you’ve always been painfully honest. That’s why you left me, if you remember.”
She let slip a reluctant smile. “What happens if I crack under questioning after you fail to show up in Holyhead?”
“You won’t. They’ll just think I got cold feet or spotted their surveillance team. They won’t blame you. Especially if you lay on the embittered ex-wife routine with a heavy hand.”
“And later if they find out you were in Clacton?”
“They’ll assume it was a deliberate blind. Besides, by then it’ll all be over.”
“How do you mean?”
“I only get one chance, Miv. If I blow it, I may as well turn myself in. This is it. Make or break.”
After seeing Miv off on the train back to Llandudno, I caught a crosscountry stopper to Nottingham and holed up overnight at a cheap hotel near the station. Next morning, I headed on east to Norwich, then struck south to Colchester and picked up the branch line to Clacton. It was a strange journey, of leaden November skies and empty trains, of edging closer to my destination without seeming to approach it. I was consciously avoiding London and anywhere I was even vaguely known, yet unconsciously I was also delaying the moment when my carefully considered plan took effect. I’d weighed the options and reduced them to this solitary throw of the dice. But the odds were stacked against me. I didn’t expect to succeed, yet I knew I couldn’t afford to fail.
I was pinning my hopes on Considine’s suspicious and secretive nature.
I felt sure he’d have foreseen the possibility of Emma moving against him and reckoned he might well have planned to move against her. Emma’s anonymity was her crucial advantage, so logically that was what he should have sought to undermine. If so, somewhere in his house, there ought to be a clue to her identity and whereabouts: an incriminating piece of paper; a tell-tale scrap of clinching evidence. The police might have removed it, of course, in the search for evidence against me. But I was willing to bet they were content to await my capture before pursuing the question of a motive. Four days had elapsed since the murder. If they had rooted around 17 Wharfedale Road, their rootings should certainly be at an end by now. With any luck, the investigating team would be in Holyhead, staking out the ferry terminal. Leaving the way clear for me to put my fragile theory to the test.
I reached Clacton at the listless outset of a dull Wednesday afternoon, my anxiety heightened by the knowledge that my photograph was bound to have been splashed around more widely here than in Birmingham or Nottingham. I’d bought a soft-brimmed tweed hat that I wouldn’t have been seen dead in before leaving Birmingham the previous day and wore it now to make myself less recognizable. But I actually put more faith in the improbability of what I was doing. Nobody would reasonably expect to see me walking the streets of Clacton.
Doing so seemed little short of lunatic to me when I confronted the terraced length of Wharfedale Road in cold blood twenty minutes later and started along it on the even numbers side. A woman with a child in a push chair bustled out of a gate ahead of me and passed by as if I didn’t exist. Then I came abreast of number seventeen. There was no policeman guarding the door, nor any other sign of murder recently done. If Considine had been beaten to death on the premises, it would have been a different story, of course. As it was…
> I moved on before anyone behind a net-curtained window could start thinking I might be loitering with sinister intent, counting the houses beyond number seventeen as I went. Wharfedale Road ended in a T-junction, where I turned left, crossing over to follow the flanks of the back gardens on Considine’s side of the road. Between them and the back gardens of the houses in the next parallel street was a narrow service alley, running straight as an arrow between the rear walls of each. Wooden gates were set in the walls, giving access to the gardens beyond, but no view into them. Still, it was a simple matter to count back to the gate serving number seventeen. Relieved to find the alley empty, save of dented dustbins, cat-gnawed refuse sacks and sicked-up Chinese takeaways, I headed down it.
Reaching Considine’s gate, I tried the handle. Predictably, it was locked. After a reassuring glance in both directions, I grasped the top of the gate and pulled myself up far enough to see over. There was no-one visible in neighbouring gardens; I looked to have a clear run. I got some sort of a foothold on the handle and scrambled over.
I’d somehow expected Considine’s garden to be a wilderness, but it was actually neat and keenly worked, with a greenhouse, vegetable patch, clipped lawn and recently creosoted shed. This meant I had no choice but to walk straight up the concrete path to the back door and pray nobody saw me from the houses on either side.
So far as I could tell, I made it unobserved. Then the real complications started. The door itself was solidly constructed, which left me a straight choice between the conservatory and the scullery window. I chose the conservatory. I grabbed a broom that was propped against a drainpipe and was about to spear a hole in one of the panes when I noticed that the stay on the other side hadn’t been secured. The window was sitting slightly proud of its frame, as if the wood had expanded and it didn’t quite fit. Relieved to be able to operate in relative silence, I abandoned the broom, took from my pocket a screwdriver I’d brought along for just such contingencies and prised the window ajar. Then I pulled it fully open with nothing worse than a creak and gingerly clambered in.
The conservatory seemed to be halfway territory between Considine’s horticultural punctiliousness and his domestic squalor, a prickly forest of healthily plump cacti flourishing amidst rusting bird cages and rotting deck chairs I hurried through to the back living-room, where the mildewed roof of the conservatory added a sallow subfusc to the gloom. It was furnished after a fashion, but the chairs and tables were overwhelmed by an obstacle course of cardboard boxes. According to the labels, they contained bulk purchases of baked beans, tomato soup, tinned fruit, ham, tea, soap, salt, sugar and God knows what besides, hoarded as a hedge against inflation or worldwide famine or some arcane calamity of Considine’s imagining. I picked my way between them, sighting nothing in the way of cabinets or cupboards where the sort of thing I was looking for could be hidden, emerged into the hall and headed for the front room where he’d entertained me a month before.
The room was as I remembered. There was no immediate sign the police had searched it. A bureau stood in one corner and was an obvious place to start. But first I made for the tea chest in the alcove next to the chimney breast. It was still there and still full of the odds and ends Considine had removed from Nicky’s flat. But at least one item was missing: the scrapbook. Had the police taken it? If so, why? If not, what had happened to it?
Then I spotted the tortoiseshell frame of the trio of pictures Considine had shown me: of Nicky as a young man; of Freda as a baby; and of Michaela. I lifted it out of the box and held it up to the light.
The photograph of Michaela was different. Gone was the swim-suited teenager who’d matured into Emma Moresco. In her place was the little girl who’d become Pauline Lucas. There she was, in the selfsame shot Ethel Jago had a copy of; where she’d been when the picture stood at her mother’s bedside; and where she’d have gone on being -but for the need to deceive me.
I dropped the picture back into the box, crossed to the bureau and lowered the flap. The contents looked innocent enough: household bills, a stack of seed catalogues, a litter of old envelopes on which Considine seemed to have carried out long division and multiplication exercises and a scatter of paper clips, pencil stubs and rubber bands.
The drawer beneath the flap seemed more promising at first glance.
There were half a dozen dog-eared notebooks inside, interleaved with scraps of paper. But inspection revealed them to be account books relating to freelance electrical work he’d carried out over the past forty or fifty years, the loose sheets to be notes of the names and addresses of clients. The cupboard below the drawer was no better, crammed as it was with what looked like several decades’ worth of Reader’s Digest.
I tried the glass-fronted cabinets next, checking the china vases and EPNS teapots and varnished ornamental boxes for hidden documents. But there was nothing in any of them.
I went out into the hall, opened the cupboard under the stairs and glanced in at a museum-piece vacuum cleaner lurking amidst a cobwebbed jungle of pipes, cables, meters and junction boxes. There was no prospect of joy there. I closed the door, moved to the foot of the stairs and ran up them two at a time.
The doors of the upper rooms stood open. A bath was visible beyond one, a loo beyond another. The next room I could see into as I reached the landing contained a bed and wardrobe. I turned towards it. As I did so, there was a faint noise to my right that made me freeze in mid-stride.
It was the sharp drawing of human breath, as unmistakable as it was unnerving. For a fraction of a second, I thought I’d misheard. Then my eyes swivelled towards the room at the far end of the landing and I glimpsed a figure sitting on the bed within. The hairs on the back of my neck bristled. There was somebody there, rising now and staring straight at me: a woman, her face cast in shadow by the window behind her.
“You,” she said, almost in a whisper. And I recognized her voice at once.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
She was dressed plainly, in black sweater and jeans. Her dark hair seemed even shorter than I remembered. She was wearing neither jewellery nor make-up and her face looked unnaturally pale. She was frightened. I could tell that by the shallowness of her breathing and the staring wideness of her eyes. She didn’t know why I was there or what I might do to her. There was no electrified railway line to keep us apart. She was the one who’d been taken by surprise this time. A man wanted for murder, whom she’d gone some way to ruining, stood between her and the stairs, blocking the doorway of the room she’d chosen to hide in. Potentially, I posed a grave threat. But she wasn’t intimidated. She wasn’t about to give way. I had the impression that was the last thing she’d ever do.
Not that she need have worried. To her, if to nobody else, I posed no kind of threat at all. Not now I knew who she truly was.
“Hello, Michaela,” I said, as calmly as I could, stepping slowly into the room. “What are you doing here?”
“Michaela?” she murmured disbelievingly.
“Yes. Michaela Lanyon. Your name, until sixteen years ago.” I glanced around. The room was small, more of a box room than a bedroom.
A single window looked out into the street. The furniture comprised a narrow dust-sheeted bed, a cabinet beside it, a rickety-looking desk stationed beneath the window and some empty shelves along one wall. The faded wallpaper sported the replicated ghost of a Mabel Lucie Attwell cherub in pyjamas and slippers, with a halo above her head. I gazed at the image and suddenly understood. “And your room,” I said, looking at Michaela. “Until sixteen years ago.”
She stared at me for several long silent seconds, then said, “How did you find out?”
“Ethel Jago recognized you from the photograph.”
“I didn’t think your sister would have the nerve to show it to anyone.”
“And I didn’t think your aunt would recognize the woman pictured in it.”
“You ought to have guessed.”
“Maybe I would have done, but for the fact that you’re not
the only one who’s been putting me through the wringer these past few weeks.”
“Why did you kill Considine?”
“I didn’t.”
The police seem to think you did.”
“They’re meant to.”
“Meant to?” A frown of apparently genuine bafflement crossed her face.
“What are you talking about?”
“I was set up. Framed by somebody who operates even more smoothly than you do.”
“Who?”
“That’s a good question. She took me in by claiming to be… you.” I saw her start with surprise. “That’s why I’m here. To find out who she really is. If I can.”
“You’re mad.”
“I’d have some excuse to be, after everything the two of you have done to me. But, no, I’m as sane as you are. And I’m speaking the absolute truth.”
Beyond Recall Page 33
